The Shame of Single Motherhood

Some things stick in the mind of a young child. When I was a young lad at elementary school, we often noticed a young female teenager walking past the school. Then she disappeared for some months, only to reappear later to a background of whispered talk among my parents and elder sister. I later found out that the young 17-year-old had given birth to a child out of wedlock.

The whispering had to do with the perceived shame of the girl’s actions. She was never seen with her child, for, as the practice was in those days, the infant was given to the care of an “orphanage.”

Those were the days when shame was attached to any action that was deemed as socially unacceptable, as being disruptive to the smooth flow of affairs in society.

Later, in my junior high school years, I only remember one incident, again whispered about, certainly not spoken of openly, involving one teen who was forced to leave school due to the shame of producing an illegitimate child.

The release of the film Blackboard Jungle in Australia during the ’50s brought with it a revelation. Suddenly it became apparent that rebellion against parents and teachers by teenage youth in American society had become part of the developing postwar culture. This hit the country like a bombshell. It seemed that overnight Aussie youth were transported into a new subculture typified by the rock and roll genre made so fashionable by that highly popular film. It spawned a whole subculture of movements—Britain’s rioting “Teddy Boys” and Australia’s “Bodgies” and “Widgies.”

Heavily greased duck-tail haircuts became the fashion among “cool” male teens who began to sport the stove pipe pants and wide shoulder pads of the zoot suit. Bright, iridescent colors made veritable peacocks out of male teen youth. The girls opted for wide hooped skirts that were designed to show off maximum flesh during the wild twists and turns of the new dance form of what was becoming the rock and roll phenomenon. The elegance of traditional ballroom dancing of the time was sacrificed on the altar of the rock beat. The beat dominated, and the results were catastrophic for society.

From that time on, teen pregnancies skyrocketed. Shotgun weddings became very fashionable as a means of legitimizing the results. Shame was speedily removed from illegitimate unions as this trend became a natural part of a society shaken off the foundation of its traditional Victorian virtues.

But at least in those years there was an attempt to legitimize, by both church and the state, those unions that produced what were previously viewed as illegitimate offspring. The pressure at that time was on the young man to accept parental responsibility and to marry the young woman whom he had “got into trouble,” as though the girl had nothing to do with the result at all.

By the last decade of the 20th century, things had changed remarkably. The social engineers had been at work and created a whole new scenario by fiddling with the law so as to deal with the drastic drop in societal morals.

During the ’80s, as the human resources director of an Australian enterprise, one of my tasks was to recruit staff nationally from a particular ethnic group. I started to notice a trend. It was becoming increasingly difficult to find well-trained and readily available young female secretaries within that group.

Then I tumbled to the answer.

Young women were finding that the sum total of non-taxable government benefits for single mothers written into the new liberalized federal family law was much more attractive than the taxable working wage for a single working girl.

Thus many simply changed career paths.

They became mere baby factories, living off the welfare state at taxpayers’ expense. The real clanger was that the sum total of non-taxable benefits given by the state to a single mother supporting two or three children was quite a degree in excess of what a married couple would receive on a husband’s taxable wage. The result was an obvious one: a veritable explosion of illegitimate births.

Moving to England in the early ’90s, I was staggered to see whole village estates populated by single mothers, living in homes paid for by the state and claiming considerable state benefits for the pleasure. The fact that their boyfriends would visit by night and escape by morning before the state welfare inspectors arrived made the whole arrangement a laughing stock of the nation.

But it gets worse.

Take the United States. Here’s an excerpt from Ann Coulter’s column last week (Human Events; emphasis added throughout):

The dregs of society need to be assessed a fee for their abuse of government services and thrown in debtors prison in the unlikely event that they can’t pay.As I described in my last book, Guilty, the leading cause of all social pathologies is single motherhood. One way or another, Casey Anthony’s refusal to give up Caylee for adoption was going to cost society—and cost Caylee.The statistics are so jaw-dropping that not giving up an illegitimate child for adoption ought to be considered child abuse.

If those words are too strong for you, then I suggest that you have allowed your moral conscience to be seared by our perverted education and media industries. Coulter simply airs the truth on the results of marital breakdown in an Anglo-Saxon society caught in the throes of its inevitable decline and fall.

I did not bother to watch even one report on the widely publicized Casey Anthony debacle. There are too many bigger stories of great prophetic value occurring hour by hour in this world to divert one’s gaze to such trash. The big story—of which Anthony and her deceased illegitimate infant are but part of the sad fragments—is what causes such horrible results.

“Various studies have shown that children raised by a single mother comprise about 70 percent of juvenile murderers, delinquents, teenaged mothers, drug abusers, dropouts, suicides and runaways. Imagine an America with 70 percent fewer of these social disorders and you will see what liberals’ destruction of marriage has wrought” (ibid).

There’s the nub of the problem! When we took away shame from conceiving children out of wedlock, denigrated marriage as an institution—often even reversing the God-given roles within marriage and putting the moms to work back in the workplace instead of the home—the whole system that had underpinned Anglo-Saxon society for millennia simply broke down. Now we reap the whirlwind: the rapid destruction of the very fabric that has held our society together for so long.

“We could wipe out chronic poverty in America tomorrow … if only women would get married before having children or give up their illegitimate kids for adoption. And yet, between 1979 and 2003, we went from about 600,000 babies being born out of wedlock, with about a quarter of them put up for adoption, to 1.5 million illegitimate births with fewer than 1 percent of them (14,000) given up for adoption” (ibid).

The results are staggering in the extreme. Again, quoting Coulter on facts readily available from legitimate, unvarnished sources: “Single mothers are six times more likely to be in poverty than married families. More than 80 percent of homeless families are single mothers. [C]onsider the burden single mothers place on law enforcement because of their higher likelihood to neglect or kill their children. Eighty-five percent of mothers who kill their children through neglect are single mothers.”

One of the devil’s main tools in enacting such a horrific negative impact on our society is, as Coulter rightly infers, “the active social policy of liberals. They enjoy experimenting with other people’s lives and leaving the taxpayer with the bill. The mainstream media and Hollywood studios are constantly issuing propaganda about the joys and triumphs of single mothers.”

One has to wonder if the Hollywood studios that produced Blackboard Jungle, and with it released an entirely new phenomenon that would literally drug teen audiences worldwide into the rock culture of rebellion against society, really foresaw the impact of the genie that they were releasing at that time—a genie that would work so quickly to pervert the fashions, tastes and the mores of generations to come.

It’s no coincidence that teen pregnancies skyrocketed in the wake of the bursting of sexually charged rock music onto the scene. With that explosion of illegitimate births came the treating of the effect—the removal of the stigma of shame attached to it. And the result? As Ann Coulter cuttingly puts it: “[O]ne can’t help noticing how many more illegitimate children there are—and the accompanying child abuse, neglect, suicide, runaways and murders—now that the stigma is gone.“

You see, it is the Creator God who stigmatized illegitimacy. But He is a merciful God, given to instant forgiveness for deep and heartfelt repentance from sin. He has not left us without clear instruction on just how to prevent and to also deal with teen pregnancy. God desires that you live a truly happy and rewarding life—His way!

Read our book The Missing Dimension in Sex and its associated booklet, Why Marriage! Soon Obsolete? They will give you the clearest of instruction on the real reasons for marriage and family. They will enlighten you as to how to effectively deal with any challenge that you face in male-female relationships and how to pursue a course to real happiness not only in this life, but now and forever!